I think there was someone else from MIT on the list, and we don’t ask for more than one person from any school. Not sure if I would have struck SP if he had been. But if I had, it wouldn’t have been because of that conference experience. I doubt he remembered it much beyond that day.
I wouldn’t say this is the norm, but it can happen. Much more common to just give tenure to tenure track faculty, but a competing offer can get used now and then.
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You can definitely use the threat of a competing offer to nudge your institution to give you a promotion. We had someone a few years ago who got an offer from somewhere else, and we put him up for tenure before he was scheduled. Otherwise, we just would have lost him.
I would say that it’s probably more common in terms of salary. Academic raises can be very small and formulaic absent special circumstances. One of those special circumstances is an outside offer with a higher salary - you can take that offer to the dean’s office and threaten to leave unless you get a raise. Of course, sometimes that fails in the sense that the dean is like, “Ok, good luck at new place.” And there are some people who have done it so many times that they’re just known as the person who gathers job offers to get raises. Which is not a good reputation to have, but I’m not sure how important that is.
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I mean, if this makes your reputation all that bad, you can dry your tears with all those job offers.
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Kind of.
A lot of these other job offers (if from other universities) will require relocating. So they’re basically bluffs, unless you’re really willing to do that. That’s easy if you’re a single bro, but much harder with a wife and kids and you’ve been living in a place for a while.
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Granted. But there are lots of colleges in desirable places. The very fact of having a college makes just about anywhere more desirable, and most of the most (at least commonly) desirable places have multiple colleges to choose from.
Moving still sucks.
As far as cities with multiple good universities to choose from are concerned, that’s a pretty short list. Our boy spidercrab is kind of a big deal. I don’t think there is any academic institution besides his current one which is a reasonable driving distance from his house, that wouldn’t be a huge step down as far as his career is concerned.
At this point, this discussion should probably go in another thread, but I am definitely open to moving. The problem is like Melkerson said, moving sucks. And when I start thinking about desirable locations with available openings that I’d be competitive for, it gets to be a very small list. Maybe it’s an ego thing or some other character flaw, but I have a hard time imagining moving to a more desirable location but working at a substantially less respected place. That’s probably a stupid mindset.
On a related note, I just got offered an editor spot at one of the top journals. Which is very nice. But there’s zero tangible benefit to me in terms of compensation or a reduction in my teaching responsibilities. So if I say yes, it’s taking on more work just for some perceived respect/theoretical ego stroking and an additional line item on my vita. Saying yes to that would probably also be a stupid mindset, but I am desperately in need of that ego stroking.
I think I need a life coach. Mostly I just wanted to quote this because I’m labeled kind of a big deal. Gonna go tell my wife.
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Nothing impresses the wives like praise from a bunch of internet dorks that got thrown off the old poker forum. Get ready to catch her when she swoons.
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I haven’t. I could arguably do some stuff related to litigation, but I’m not sure I want to give up more of my life. Feel like I’m more time-constrained than money-constrained right now. Maybe that will change when my kids get older.
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This post could be appropriate for this thread, meta and crypto … Do folks have thoughts on investments to play the upcoming “metaverse” explosion?
I keep thinking about Roblox.
Consensys is private, but they built metamask I think, and have aspirations of going public. Some sketchiness, but also major names involved.
Is there a metaverse-ethereum link? Depends on the metaverse, I guess. I’ve been looking for ether-related companies and also buying ETH.
lmao who do these people think they’re fooling? I know, I know, but going to rant anyways: my F500 company announced earnings this morning, stonk has been on a tear for some time, hit an ATH yesterday.
I wake up to “company just turned in an outstanding third quarter and numbers like these show that our team continues to delight guests and drive growth on top of growth across the business.” company wide email and I’m like oh cool I’m rich and I go to check it and yeah its down 5%.
Oh no did your company report a positive net income? That’s for loser companies! SELL SELL SELL SELL.
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What about metaverse property stuff like decentraland and sandbox?
I think basically every company lying about how awesome things are constantly is just priced in to every stonk.
I forget the exact number but like 80% of companies beat estimates and the ones that don’t churn out some complete horseshit like “adjusted earnings” where they strip out supposedly non-recurring expenses or whatever, literally never does the CEO get on the earnings call and just say “yeah we had a bad quarter, we misjudged some stuff, we will try to do better.”
Actually back in 2013 I took a job at another F500 retailer. The CEO was just hired from outside at that time too. There was an all hands late that year where he said basically that, “we didn’t do great, we have an amazing plan to do better”. I quit like 3 months later, he was fired a year later, company was dismantled and sold off a couple years after that. 
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I worked for the Hard Rock in Vegas. Was awesome, company really cared about their staff.
Got sold to an investment firm. We always had a yearly all staff town hall. Town hall happens after the investment firm takes over. Starts like this:
“Thank you everybody for another incredible, record-breaking year…, blah, blah, etc.”
About a week later we all get notice that they’re changing the benefits. No more 401k match, and we’re lowering our share of your health insurance.
That was the beginning of the end of the awesomeness of the Hard Rock.
The standard is that you can’t hold substantially identical stock or securities during the period. I don’t think there’s any guidance on what that means. I think you have a good argument if you sell one ETF and buy an ETF from a different sponsor tracking the same index (different issuer, different investment advisor), but that’s a little dicey. Tracking a different index is stronger, even if there’s some overlap. In practice, though, it’s probably better to just harvest your losers and park the proceeds in a different allocation for the requisite time period, then shift back into your target allocation. Being misallocated for a few months doesn’t really matter, and then you won’t have to worry about it.
Also, how the hell do you have losses to harvest??
This would be too close for comfort for me - I think it’s very possible the IRS could consider a Vanguard S&P 500 index fund to be substantially identical to a Fidelity S&P 500 index fund. But something like a Vanguard Total U.S. Index fund would be sufficiently different to switch to, while still being more or less economically equivalent to an S&P 500 fund.
In Canada this is called the “superficial loss” rule and as far as I know it only applies to transactions in the same security. So you can flip baskets of individual securities for ETFs and vice versa. I am not aware of any CRA rulings to the contrary. But I’m not a tax lawyer.
For most retail investors I think tax loss harvesting is overrated because of behaviour slippage. My motto is that every transaction is an opportunity to make a mistake, so I would generally say its better to focus on building a tax efficient buy and hold portfolio than to go for short term transactional tactics. But I recognize there are valid arguments to do it. Like I said, its partly personal preference. I like investment strategies that are simple.